This article examines the interaction of welfarism with economías propias—locally embedded economic practices of rural Andean communities. We define welfarism as a power mechanism, both governmental and non-governmental, based on external support for populations considered marginalized; it encompasses aid that mitigates poverty as well as programs implementing public policies, such as state-led rural investment schemes. We conceptualize economías propias within the framework of contemporary Transformation Initiatives (TIs) because they challenge dominant economic narratives that reduce the economy to the capitalist sphere. From an anthropological perspective, the article explores the cultural dispositions of rural communities for social change, focusing on how welfarist policies shape everyday life, requiring negotiation to adapt them to local contexts while maintaining autonomy and agency. Based on ethnographic research conducted in Peru, Colombia, and Bolivia (2018–2023), our findings show that welfarist dynamics have been internalized in most identified initiatives. Through a lateral comparison of three case studies from southern Peru, we demonstrate that TIs are not an ideal rupture with the status quo, but rather a combination of existing and prefigured elements resulting in creative potential and internal tension. This hybrid character of TIs is precisely what lateral comparison between cases illuminates. These conclusions help deromanticize Latin American TIs and offer a more complex understanding of the mutual inspiration of transformative movements worldwide.
Drawing on my fieldwork on surfing in Portugal, I zone in on a contradiction between surfing’s romanticized image as countercultural and (at least) at variance with capitalism by virtue of its association with nature and antithesis to work; and a reality of surfing’s comprehensive commodification, detrimental social and ecological effects, and buttressing of the very work-life it purportedly rejects. I argue that surfing’s representation as fun and liberatory is an alienated response to these entanglements in capitalism. Its packaging as a hard to communicate pastime whose appeal can only be accessed through corporal first-hand accounts reproduces precisely the obscuring effects of this alienation.
Analysts of US policies toward Israel typically emphasize “lobby” influence, ethnic and religious voting blocs, and geostrategic calculations—yet seldom theorize how these mediate capitalist class power. This article extends a tradition of analysis of the class project of imperialism by examining an underappreciated mechanism: the two countries’ origin myths and their contrasting treatments of pilgrimage. Since the 19th century, founding settlers of New England have retroactively been named “Pilgrims”—a usage which identified the US as a “Promised Land” while sidelining the nation-building role of non-Protestant immigrants. The “Pilgrim” myth fused landless errance, tributary voyage, and spiritual destiny into national legitimation. Zionist notions of “return” imagine a unified “Jewish people” and occlude the Zionist state’s precursors—namely, Jewish pilgrimage to Palestine and the Crusader states once tasked with protecting Christian pilgrims. This paradox suggests linking US sponsorship of Israel to the forgotten politics of pilgrimage in the history of Palestine, and to the ideological function of pilgrimage narratives in US capitalist industrialization and global ascent. Among the Europeans recruited for US capitalism were cohorts of Ashkenazi Jews, subsequently diverted to Palestine as settlers and bulwarks first for British and then US imperialism. The combined erasure and conjuring of pilgrimage has forged national attachments and justified war on the Arab world, while mystifying the class interests that drive wars of encroachment. This interplay reveals how origin myths rationalize the coordination of labor and capital across production and destruction—an arbitrage at the heart of US capitalism and Zionist expansion.
The intricate relationship between labour and energy transition forms the cornerstone of a just transition. This article advances this argument through a dialectical account of India’s energy transition in rural eastern India. Drawing on one year of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the rural eastern Indian village of Srikhanda, it traces a contradiction between a developmentalist wage imaginary of unnoyon (progress) promised through secure chakri (formal jobs); and the reorganization of labour under post-coal transition conditions. This contradiction is mediated through two processes. First, the stalling of a thermal powerplant in the vicinity of the village that materialized an interrupted future of industrial wage-labour. Second, the proliferation of a livelihood associated with the informal electric paratransit vehicle locally called toto as a response to an uncertain future. Together, these processes rework livelihood strategies while reproducing precarity and caste and class inequalities. The energy transition thus appears not as a linear substitution of technologies but as a reorganization of labour relations and livelihood affordances. Thus, by centering livelihoods the article frames the energy transition as being navigated predominantly through labour relations.
This paper examines how Indigenous and campesina women in the southern Ecuadorian Andes mobilize agroecology as a form of territorial defense against large-scale metal mining. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted between 2023 and 2024 with women participating in agroecology schools (escuelitas), we develop the concept of ‘women’s plot-labor’ to describe women’s productive, reproductive, and affective agroecological labor practices. Building upon scholarship on plantation-plot dialectics, decolonial feminists, and feminist political economy, we argue that women’s plot-labor comprises a form of “commoning” rooted in Andean notions of the minga (reciprocal labor exchange) that produces relations of political, economic, and affective solidarity that open emancipatory futures. Our ethnographic research illustrates how labor practices that enact territorial defense are cultivated in chakras (provision plots), patios, kitchens, and bingo table—places where women gather, talk, organize, and create and imagine alternative lifeways. The paper highlights the plurality of ‘commoning’ practices such as seed exchange, mutual feeding, healing, and collective labor. Far from being solely a technical or economic alternative, we suggest that expansive agroecological practices based upon ‘commoning’ illuminate the transformative potential of women’s plot-labor to contest extractive economies and remake social and ecological relations.
The Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra-MST) emerged in Brazil in 1984 as a response to the country’s agrarian structure, which to this day exhibits one of the highest levels of land concentration in the world, rooted in its colonial and slaveholding past. This article is the result of militant research grounded in the author’s engagement with one of MST’s training centers in the state of Bahia: the Luana Carvalho Technical School in Agroecology (ETALC). Drawing on a debate concerning the role of schooling within class struggle, and on the principles of rural education (educação do campo) and agroecology, the study analyzes strategies for transformation along the trajectory of the school. First, it demonstrates the relationship between struggles for education and for land in the context of agrarian reform in Brazil. Second, it highlights how the construction of social technologies within the school constitutes a form of experimentation with and dissemination of agroecology in the territory, involving rural youth. Finally, it examines how the diversity of educational temporalities and interdisciplinary projects, aimed at confronting social oppression, contributes to the human formation of students. The experience of ETALC was analyzed through multiple dimensions exploring possible pathways of social transformation.
